Stick with it
As Ava writes on you can stick with it (blog.avas.space):
"Switching the tool or hoster won’t suddenly give you more time, more discipline, more fun writing, like your own thoughts more etc. and if it does, it’s likely just temporary because it’s shiny and new."
Words of wisdom.
I’m at my most productive when I’m using familiar tools. Tools can’t become familiar if you don’t use them for a decent period of time.
Pick something and stick with it. Figure out what it can do. Is it really too inflexible? Check the manual. Have you tried working around the limitation? Maybe there’s a better way to do what you want if you get creative about it.
Ava makes it clear that this isn’t just about choice of tools, either.
I used to bail out on drawings if they weren’t going well. Now I stick with them a little longer and sometimes they work out. That feels really good. There’s this moment when I think, "Hey, this is getting better, not worse." I’m not sure why that moment is so satisfying, but it is.
I used to fail at watercolor again and again because the first stages look like washed out garbage. I eventually pushed through that. Today, I’m reasonably happy with my watercolor and guess what? The first stages still look like washed out garbage. Now I have the experience to see what it’s going to be.
A formative experience I had with "limitations"
I once did this silly exercise many years ago where I did a new piece of art every day in a popular commercial drawing program I owned. The catch: I had to use a new brush and only that brush for the entire drawing. The outcome, which I had not predicted at all, was that I ended up learning all of the per-brush settings in that program.
I learned how to make whole drawings with lines and gradients from practically every brush by tweaking the alpha, the size, the randomization, and the frequency of patterns. Sometimes I just lived with the weird effects as they were and delighted at the whimsical strangeness of the resulting art. The end result: I knew that program way better and I had some new favorite effects I would likely never have discovered otherwise. I ended up extremely comfortable using that software and stuck with it for a long time.
(Like I said, it was commercial software and required paying for updates to work with operating system upgrades. Otherwise, I would probably still be using it today.)
There was an overarching "learning how to learn" meta-skill that I gained from it.
You can do this kind of deep exploration with just about any tool. Get creative!
The problem is that we can’t see into the future, you just have to hope
I’ve often thought it would be easy to stick with something if you could see into the future and know it would work out. The effort would be the same, but the uncertainty would be gone. I think most of what makes it hard to push through the hard parts is just not knowing if it’ll be worth it!
I sometimes wish we could have little progress meters that tell us that we’re on the right track and what percentage we are on our way to our goals.
Like, if I knew for a fact that understanding a difficult computer science paper would improve my programming life, I would get through it. Especially if I could see the milestones as I reached them. I’m pretty sure it’s the uncertainty that the effort will be worth it that makes me quit stuff like that.
It’s an act of faith, I guess. And it’s a faith that grows stronger as you get some successes under your belt.
Another word for that kind of faith is Wisdom.
And…it appears I wrote something quite related to this three years ago here: Commit!